Patrick Mills

This report's authors examine the contributions of overseas campaigning instruments to U.S. strategic goals. The authors conducted statistical analyses of the relationships between these tools and deterrence, access and cooperation, and partner stability and developed rough-order-of-magnitude cost estimates for these instruments to provide the foundations of a decision-support tool to inform U.S. Department of Defense campaign planning.

The U.S. Air Force is exploring adaptive basing (AB) concepts to reduce the vulnerability of U.S. forces and to preserve critical combat capabilities in highly contested environments. These concepts are likely to stress the U.S. Air Force's global mobility capabilities. This report assesses the impact of AB concepts on the Mobility Air Forces and to recommends enhancements to better support AB operations in a contested environment.

The U.S. Air Force has determined that its fighter pilots do not currently have sufficient access to training ranges with airspace, threat emitters, targets, and electronic support measures capable of representing advanced potential adversaries. The authors explore squadron restationing and range upgrade options that can maximize access to advanced live training ranges while evaluating cost and risk measures associated with these options.

Improving demand forecast accuracy is one way to reduce the $4 billion that the Air Force spends annually on spare parts. A step toward this is to reduce the flying hour variance--the difference between predicted and actual numbers of flying hours. RAND researchers were asked to gauge the potential effect of flying hour variance on cost and readiness, identify the causes of the variance and quantify their effects, and identify possible solutions.

The Air Force lacks a comprehensive tool or methodology for integrated deployment planning that can rapidly explore trade-offs among capability (or risk), speed, and cost to achieve lean force packages for use in contested, degraded, and operationally limited environments. This report describes a methodology and prototype tool--called the Lean Strategic Tool for the Analysis of Required Transportation (Lean-START)--that fills the void.

This report provides a strategic view of the analytical capabilities that are needed by the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center (AFIMSC) to allocate resources to and assess the performance of installation and mission support activities. AFIMSC needs a coherent, rational, and transparent method to allocate resources across missions and installations.

This report explores the relationship between Air Force infrastructure management and mission capability and risk. The goal is to identify methodological approaches and data requirements for quantifying and articulating these links and enabling the Air Force to answer the question: What is the effect of funding infrastructure below stated requirements?

This report proposes new metrics to measure expeditionary agile combat support (ACS) capacity and uses these metrics to assess the capacity of the current ACS manpower mix to support expeditionary operations, finding that there are imbalances among its career fields relative to expeditionary demands. This report develops and assesses several rebalanced manpower mixes to address these imbalances.

This report seeks to inform the debate over the extent of U.S. military presence overseas by providing a rigorous estimate of the costs associated with maintaining U.S. Air Force installations and units overseas rather than in the United States.

The findings presented here reexamine capabilities-based programming by introducing a new definition of capability metrics and a new set of algorithms for building and evaluating programs. The tools provide the programmer with a means to quantitatively and reproducibly develop programming options in light of an uncertain future, serving as a means to express capabilities and risks of resource allocations in terms of national planning objectives.

This book describes a potential common operating system (COP) for the Air Force material sustainment system (MSS). The authors first develop a COP based on the principles of effects-based measures, schwerpunkt (organizational focus), decision rights, and a nonmarket economic framework, then they apply the COP to depot-level reparable component sustainment to illustrate how the COP would improve overall MSS efficiency and responsiveness.This book describes a common operating picture for the Air Force materiel sustainment system that, if implemented, would make the system more efficient and more responsive to changing operational needs.

This report develops operational architecture to guide the development of combat support command and control (CSC2). As part of a series on supporting the Air and Space Expeditionary Force, this report looks at the current operational architecture for incorporating combat support command and control (CSC2) and proposes an expanded architecture for the future.

The Department of Defense in recent years has shifted from threat-based planning to structuring its forces to provide a range of capabilities. As such, the need has arisen for new methods to assess the Air Force's manpower and materiel deployment capabilities. The authors outline a method for assessing Air and Space Expeditionary Force capabilities given certain policies and resource levels, and they illustrate how this method can contribute to the capabilities-based planning environment.

How can the Air Force improve the planning and execution activities associated with developing intratheater airlift operations within the military joint end-to-end multimodal movement system? Recent operations have shed light on shortfalls in Air Force intratheater airlift. Using an expanded strategies-to-tasks framework, the authors assess current intratheater airlift processes, organizations, doctrine, training, and systems. This report catalogues identified shortfalls and recommends options for improving the Theater Distribution System. The authors recommend separation of supply, demand, and integrator roles and adoption of a closed-loop planning and execution process.

Describes a prototype research tool for determining manpower and equipment deployment requirements; The Air Force's transition from a threat-based to a capabilities-based planning posture suggests the need to calculate swiftly the manpower and equipment required to generate those capabilities. This book outlines just such a methodology for determining deployment requirements. The methodology employs a prototype research tool--the Strategic Tool for the Analysis of Required Transportation (Start)--which generates lists of capability units required to support a user-specified operation. The appendix serves as a user's guide to the Start program